The Coryston Family - Mrs. Humphry Ward (best biographies to read TXT) 📗

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Marcia was only too glad to be helped. It had begun to seem to her, in spite of the rush of her London gaieties, and the brilliance of her London successes, that she had been very lonely at home for a long time, and here, in this strong man, were warmth and shelter.

* * * * *

Luncheon passed gaily, and Lady Coryston perceived, or thought she perceived, that Marcia's affairs were marching briskly toward their destined end. Newbury took his leave immediately afterward, saying to Lady Coryston, "So we expect you--next Sunday?" The slight emphasis he laid on the words, the pressure on her hand seemed to reveal to her the hope in the young man's mind. Well!--the sooner, the better.

Afterward Lady Coryston paid some calls in the village, and, coming home through a stately series of walled gardens ablaze with spring flowers, she gave some directions for a new herbaceous border. Then she returned to the house to await her son. Marcia meanwhile had gone to the station to meet Sir Wilfrid Bury.

Coryston duly arrived, a more disreputable figure than usual--bedraggled with rain, his shabby trousers tucked into his boots, and his cap festooned with fishing-flies; for the afternoon had turned showery, and Coryston had been pursuing the only sport which appealed to him in the trout-stream of the park. Before he did so he had formally asked leave of the agent, and had been formally granted it.

He and Lady Coryston were closeted together for nearly an hour. Had any one been sitting in the adjoining room they would have heard, save on two occasions when the raised voices clashed together, but little variation in the tones of the combatants. When the conference broke up and Coryston departed Lady Coryston was left alone for a little while. She sat motionless in her chair beside her writing-table. Animation and color faded slowly from her features; and before her trance of thought was broken by the arrival of a servant announcing that Sir Wilfrid Bury had arrived, one who knew her well would have been startled by certain subtle changes in her aspect.

Coryston, meanwhile, made his way to the great library in the north wing, looking for Lester. He found the young librarian at his desk, with a fifteenth-century MS. before him, which he was describing and cataloguing. The beautiful pages sparkling with color and gold were held open by glass weights, and the young man's face, as he bent over his task, showed the happy abstraction of the scholar. All around him rose the latticed walls of the library, holding on one side a collection of MSS., on the other of early printed books, well known to learned Europe. Wandering gleams from the showery sky outside lit up the faded richness of the room, the pale brown and yellows of the books, the sharp black and white of the old engravings hanging among them. The windows were wide open, and occasionally a westerly gust would blow in upon the floor petals from a fruit tree in blossom just outside.

Coryston came in, looking rather flushed and excited, and took a seat on the edge of the table where Lester was working, his hands in his pockets.

"What a blessed place!" he said, glancing round him. Lester looked up and smiled absently.

"Not bad?"

Silence a moment. Then Coryston said, with sudden vehemence:

"Don't you go into politics, Lester!"

"No fear, old man. But what's up, now? You seem to have been ragging a good deal."

"I've been 'following the gleam,'" said Coryston, with a sarcastic mouth. "Or to put it in another way--there's a hot coal in me that makes me do certain things. I dignify it by calling it a sense of justice. What is it? I don't know. I say, Lester, are you a Suffragist?"

"Haven't made up my mind."

"I am--theoretically. But upon my word--politics plays the deuce with women. And sometimes I think that women will play the deuce with politics."

"You mean they're so unmeasured?" said Lester, cautiously.

Coryston shook his head vaguely, staring at the floor, but presently broke out:

"I say, Lester, if we can't find generosity, tenderness, an open mind--among women--where the devil are we going to find them?" He stood up. "And politics kills all that kind of thing."

"'Physician, heal thyself,'" laughed Lester.

"Ah, but it's our _business_!'"--Coryston smote the table beside him--"our dusty, d--d business. We've got somehow to push and harry and drive this beastly world into some sort of decency. But the women!--oughtn't they to be in the shrine--tending the mystic fire? What if the fire goes out--if the heart of the nation dies?"

Lester's blue-gray eyes looked up quietly. There was sympathy in them, but he said nothing.

Coryston tramped half-way to the library door, then turned back.

"My mother's quite a good woman," he said, abruptly. "There are no great scandals on this estate--it's better managed than most. But because of this poison of politics, no one can call their souls their own. If she'd let them live their own lives they'd adore her."

"The trade-unions are just the same."

"I believe you!" said Coryston. "Freedom's a lost art in England--from Parliament downward. Well, well--Good-by!"

"Coryston!"

"Yes?" Lord Coryston paused with his hand on the door.

"Don't take the chair for Glenwilliam?"

"By George, I will!" Coryston's eyes flamed. And going out he noisily shut the door.

* * * * *

Lester was left to his work. But his mood had been diverted, and he presently found that he was wasting time. He walked to the window, and stood there gazing at the bright flower-beds in the formal garden, the fountain plashing in its center, the low hills and woods that closed the horizon, the villages with their church-towers, piercing the shelter of the woods. May had drawn over the whole her first veils of green. The English perfection, the English mellowness, was everywhere; the spring breathings in the air came scented with the young leaf of trees that had been planted before Blenheim was fought.

Suddenly across the farther end of the garden passed a girlish figure in white. Lester's pulses ran. It was Marcia. He saw her but seldom, and that generally at a distance. But sometimes she would come, in her pretty, friendly way, to chat to him about his work, and turn over his manuscripts.

"She has the same feeling about me that nice women have about their dogs and cats. They are conscious of them, sorry for them; they don't like them to feel themselves neglected. So she comes to see me every now and then--lest I should think myself forgotten. Her conscience pricks her for people less prosperous than herself. I see it quite plainly. But she would be angry if I were to tell her so!"


CHAPTER VII

It was a breezy June afternoon, with the young summer at its freshest and lustiest.

Lord and Lady William Newbury were strolling in the garden at Hoddon Grey. The long low line of the house rose behind them--an attractive house and an old one, but with no architectural features to speak of, except a high-pitched mossy roof, a picturesque series of dormer-windows, and a high gable and small lantern cupola at the farther end which marked the private chapel. The house was evidently roomy, but built for comfort, not display; the garden with its spreading slopes and knolls was simple and old-fashioned, in keeping thereby with the general aspect of the two people who were walking up and down the front lawn together.

Lord William Newbury was a man of sixty-five, tall and slenderly built. His pale hazel eyes, dreamily kind, were the prominent feature of his face; he had very thin flat cheeks, and his white hair--he was walking bareheaded--was blown back from a brow which, like the delicate mouth, was still young, almost boyish. Sweetness and a rather weak refinement--a stranger would probably have summed up his first impressions of Lord William, drawn from his bodily presence, in some such words. But the stranger who did so would have been singularly wide of the mark. His wife beside him looked even frailer and slighter than he. A small and mouse-like woman, dressed in gray clothes of the simplest and plainest make, and wearing a shady garden hat; her keen black eyes in her shriveled face gave that clear promise of strong character in which her husband's aspect, at first sight, was lacking. But Lady William knew her place. She was the most submissive and the most docile of wives; and on no other terms would life have been either possible or happy in her husband's company.

They were discussing, with some eagerness, the approaching arrival of their week-end guests--Lady Coryston and Marcia, the new dean of a neighboring cathedral, an ex-Cabinet Minister and an Oxford professor. But the talk, however it circled, had a way of returning to Marcia. It was evident that she held the field.

"It is so strange that I have scarcely seen her!" Lady William was saying in a tone which was not without its note of complaint. "I hope dear Edward has not been too hasty in his choice. As for you, William, I don't believe you would know her again, if you were to see her without her mother."

"Oh yes, I should. Her mother introduced her to me at the Archbishop's party, and I talked to her a little. A very handsome young woman. I remember thinking her talk rather too theatrical."

"About theaters, you mean," sighed Lady William. "Well, that's the way with all the young people. The fuss people make about actors and actresses is perfectly ridiculous."

"I remember she talked to me enthusiastically about Madame Froment," said Lord William, in a tone of reminiscence. "I asked her whether she knew that Madame Froment had a scandalous story, and was not fit acquaintance for a young girl. And she opened her eyes at me, as though I had propounded something absurd. 'One doesn't inquire about that!' she said--quite indignantly, I assure you! 'but only whether she can _act_.' It was curious--and rather disquieting--to see so much decision-- self-assertion--in so young a woman."

"Oh, well, Edward will change all that." Lady William's voice was gently confident. "He assures me that she has excellent principles--a fine character really, though quite undeveloped. He thinks she will be readily guided by one she loves."

"I hope so, for Edward's sake--for he is very much in love. I trust he is not letting inclination run away with him. So much--to all of us--depends on his marriage!"

Lord William, frowning a little, paused a moment in his walk and turned his eyes to the house. Hoddon Grey had only become his personal property some three years before this date; but ever since his boyhood it had been associated for him with hallowed images and recollections. It had been the dower-house of his widowed mother, and after her death his brother, a widower with one crippled son, had owned it for nearly a quarter of a century. Both father and son had belonged to the straitest sect of Anglo-Catholicism; their tender devotion to each other had touched with beauty the austerity and seclusion of their lives. Yet at